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Stories from the Road - Roanoke City Public Schools

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I've worked on the marketing team at SchoolDude since 2013. I currently am the Public K-12 Marketing Manager and serve the Public K-12 market with helpful resources and trends that can help them in their day-to-day work. I work closely with the sales organization and several other departments to ensure clients and the public have a clear understanding of what SchoolDude does and the benefits our solutions provide to educational institutions. It’s exciting to work in marketing everyday and see clients succeed and schools benefit from using SchoolDude. I grew up in Virginia and graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Business- Wahoowa!

Kathryn Ward has been an Application Engineer for SchoolDude since 2011. Kathryn provides world-class support and works closely with our clients to ensure their success, anticipate challenges our clients face, and deliver practical solutions to overcome them.

I had the pleasure of spending time last week with Roanoke City Schools in the beautiful Roanoke Valley of Virginia. I may be a little partial since I grew up right down the street; either way my time spent with their team was invaluable! Tuesday’s visit was focused on cleaning up their MaintenanceDirect account.

Like a lot of you reading this blog post, Roanoke City has owned our MaintenanceDirect system for over 8 years and in that 8 years they have seen several different folks at the helm of the maintenance and facilities ship. Over that time everyone has added items to MaintenanceDirect; therefore, their process has sailed slightly off path. Carol Roberts recently came into her role as Work Order & Documentation Specialist and realized something had to be done - she took the lead in enlisting SchoolDude to help. One of their biggest issues was having too many active crafts ‘turned on’ in the system. We were able to recommend which crafts to have visible, and fixed that in a jiffy with the help of the SchoolDude data services team.

Roanoke City also welcomed Jeff Shawver on November 4th as their new Chief of Physical Plants. Jeff will be working with SchoolDude and his Roanoke City team to ensure the successful implementation of MaintenanceDirect and PMDirect from here on out. Jeff and his team are also hoping to add FSDirect and CommunityUse to help streamline their event scheduling process. What a lucky group to have such an enthusiastic, open-minded leader coming in. Thank you to Bernardo, Kevin, Susan, Carol, Penny, Jeff, Steve, and Mr. Baker for making the most of my time in Roanoke. We are very excited to see the positive improvements and change coming your way!